What's the point of seeking out new life and new civilizations without aliens to find?

Dal Rassak wrote:

Or at least have some real CGI oddities that could be any shape the programmer decides.

That would have worked really well in the 1960's.

The Abyss was released in 1989 and Jurassic Park was released in 1993. The first Pentium chip was introduced in 1993.

What precisely do you think CGI aliens would have looked like on TNG, how much would they have cost to make, and how many of what kind of computers running for how long would it have taken to render them?

__________________“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP” — Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015)